The Sacramental Life

The Life in Christ (Greek Peri tes en Christoi zoes), the masterwork of St. Nicholas Cabasilas, is a treatise in seven books on the whole of the spiritual life understood as a life received through the Mysteries of the Church. Its argument is that the life in Christ is begun in this present world and perfected in the world to come, and that it is communicated not by ascetic technique but by the three great sacraments of Christian initiation — Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist. The result is a distinctively sacramental mysticism in which grace precedes effort and the moral life flows from the sacramental life rather than founding it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (lay theologian; the sacramental life)

A Treatise on the Whole Spiritual Life

Among the works of the Byzantine fourteenth century The Life in Christ occupies a place apart. It is neither a monastic handbook of the kind associated with the Philokalia tradition nor a polemical tract of the hesychast controversy, but a sustained and architecturally ordered exposition of what the Christian life as such consists in (deCatanzaro 1974, translator’s introduction; Spiteris 1996). Its author was a layman of Thessaloniki and Constantinople, kinsman and associate of Nilus Cabasilas the metropolitan, who wrote for the ordinary baptized Christian living in the world rather than for the monk in the cell (see The Layman Theologian; see Thessaloniki in the Fourteenth Century). This is decisive for the whole shape of the work: Cabasilas locates the spiritual life where every Christian, lay or monastic, stands — in the sacramental economy of the Church — rather than in feats of asceticism available only to some.

The Greek title, Peri tes en Christoi zoes, “Concerning the Life in Christ,” takes its language directly from St. Paul, for whom “to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21) and who declares that “your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Cabasilas takes the Pauline phrase as the name of the reality he describes and as the programme of his treatise (The Life in Christ, Book I; deCatanzaro 1974). The critical edition of Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, published in the Sources Chrétiennes series, established the Greek text and its manuscript tradition and remains the scholarly reference (Congourdeau, La Vie en Christ, SC 355 & 361, 1989–1990). The standard English version is that of Carmino J. deCatanzaro, by which the work is most often cited (deCatanzaro 1974).

The Governing Thesis: Begun Here, Perfected Hereafter

The opening of the treatise states its controlling idea with great clarity: the life in Christ originates in this present life and takes its beginning here, but it is brought to perfection only in the life to come, when we shall attain to that day (The Life in Christ, Book I; deCatanzaro 1974). Cabasilas insists that the future blessedness is not something wholly deferred and merely awaited; its substance is already at work in the faithful now, through the Mysteries, like a light already kindled that will one day shine fully (The Life in Christ, Book I; Spiteris 1996). The saints of the world to come do not begin to be united to Christ only after death; they carry into eternity a union already begun and already real, so that the future life is the unveiling and consummation of what the sacraments have planted (The Life in Christ, Book I; Russell 2004, 304–306).

This eschatological framing governs everything that follows. Because the life in Christ is a single reality stretching from the font to the resurrection, the Mysteries are not isolated ritual moments but the very channels through which the eternal life is communicated to mortal human beings in time. Cabasilas’s debt here is to the whole Greek patristic understanding of the economy of salvation, and especially to St. Maximus the Confessor, for whom the incarnate Christ is the beginning, middle, and end of all the ages and the deifying union of God and creation is realized in the Church’s mystagogy (on Maximus see the collection on St. Maximus; Louth, in the scholarship on Cabasilas’s patristic sources). What Maximus articulates cosmically, Cabasilas applies to the individual believer: the life in Christ is the human being’s participation, already inaugurated, in the deified humanity of the risen Lord.

The Three Mysteries of Initiation

The heart of the treatise is its account of how this life is communicated, and the answer is given through the three great sacraments of Christian initiation, treated in order in the central books. Cabasilas’s structure follows the sequence of the rites themselves as they were administered in the Byzantine Church: Baptism, then the anointing with the holy myron (Chrismation), then the Eucharist, the three together constituting the single movement by which a person is made a Christian (The Life in Christ, Books II–IV; deCatanzaro 1974; on the unity of these rites see The Sacraments of Initiation: Baptism and Chrismation). His genius is to read these three Mysteries not as separate graces but as three moments of one gift — being, energy, and perfection — so that the whole of the initiated life is contained in them.

Baptism: Birth and Being in Christ

The treatise devotes its second book to Baptism, which Cabasilas treats as the birth into the life in Christ — the sacrament that gives existence and being in Christ to those who before were not (The Life in Christ, Book II; deCatanzaro 1974). He works through the rich biblical names for the rite: it is illumination, regeneration, a washing, a cleansing, a seal, and above all a new birth, taking up the Lord’s words to Nicodemus that one must be born of water and the Spirit to enter the kingdom (John 3:5; The Life in Christ, Book II). Through Baptism the Christian is conformed to the death and resurrection of Christ, buried with Him and raised with Him, as St. Paul teaches that we are baptized into His death and walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4; The Life in Christ, Book II; Spiteris 1996). For Cabasilas the font does not merely wash away sin negatively; it confers a new mode of being, a real ontological participation in Christ that is the foundation on which everything else in the spiritual life is built (Russell 2004, 305).

Chrismation: The Energy and Activity

The third book treats Chrismation, the anointing with the holy myron, which Cabasilas understands as the Mystery that imparts the energy or activity of the Spirit to the one already given being in Christ by Baptism (The Life in Christ, Book III; deCatanzaro 1974). If Baptism gives existence, Chrismation gives the powers and operations proper to that new existence — it sets the new life in motion, communicating the gifts of the Holy Spirit so that what was born in the font may now act (The Life in Christ, Book III; Spiteris 1996). Cabasilas relates the myron to the priestly and kingly anointing of the Old Covenant and to the descent of the Spirit on Christ Himself, drawing the parallel between the Anointed One and those who, by the chrism, are made partakers of His anointing (cf. 1 John 2:20, 27; The Life in Christ, Book III). The distinction of being and energy across Baptism and Chrismation is one of the most characteristic features of his sacramental theology and shows his careful, almost systematic, ordering of the gifts.

The Eucharist: The Perfection and Consummation

The fourth book, on the Eucharist, is the summit of the treatise. Here Cabasilas reaches the Mystery that perfects and consummates all the others, the goal toward which Baptism and Chrismation were ordered as toward their end (The Life in Christ, Book IV; deCatanzaro 1974). His decisive claim is that in the other Mysteries Christ is, in a manner, possessed or shared in part, but in the Eucharist He is received whole and entire, and the believer is no longer merely possessor of a gift but is wholly united to the Giver Himself (The Life in Christ, Book IV; Spiteris 1996; Russell 2004, 305–306). The Eucharist alone, among the sacraments, gives Christ not in figure or in power but in His own body and blood, and so it is the most intimate of all unions; beyond it there is nothing further to be received in this life, for the soul possesses the whole of Christ (The Life in Christ, Book IV; on the realism of this teaching see The Eucharist). Cabasilas stands here in the line of Eucharistic realism that runs through the Greek Fathers, taking the Lord’s words at their full weight: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:56; The Life in Christ, Book IV). The full development of this union — that we do not assimilate Christ to ourselves but are assimilated to Him — belongs to the companion study (see Union with Christ).

The Later Books: Altar, Virtue, and Human Nobility

The treatise does not close with the Eucharist. The remaining books extend the sacramental vision into the consecration of the altar and the moral life. Cabasilas turns to the consecration of the holy table — the altar on which the Mysteries are celebrated — treating the dedication of the altar as itself bound up with the life in Christ, since it is the place from which the faithful receive the perfecting sacrament (The Life in Christ, Book V; deCatanzaro 1974). The later books then take up the life of virtue, showing how the moral and ascetic life is to be understood as the proper fruit and exercise of the sacramental grace already received, and concluding with a meditation on the dignity and nobility of human nature, created and renewed for Christ (The Life in Christ, Books VI–VII; deCatanzaro 1974; Spiteris 1996). The order is significant: virtue comes after the sacraments, not before them, because for Cabasilas the human will is enabled to good only by the grace already given, and the nobility of the human creature consists precisely in its capacity to be filled by and united to its Lord. This Christ-centred reading of human nature is among his most original contributions and is treated in its own place (see A Christ-Centred Anthropology).

A Sacramental Mysticism

The deepest characteristic of The Life in Christ — the feature that distinguishes Cabasilas within the whole Byzantine spiritual tradition — is that he grounds the entire mystical and moral life in the sacraments rather than in ascetic method. Where much of the monastic literature describes the soul’s ascent to God through stages of purification, prayer, and contemplation that the ascetic labours to attain, Cabasilas begins from what God has already done and continues to do in the Mysteries, so that union with Christ is first of all received, not achieved (Spiteris 1996; Russell 2004, 304–306). This is not a rejection of asceticism — the later books make ample room for the labour of virtue — but a re-ordering of priorities: the sacraments are the cause and the moral effort the response, the grace the ground and the works the fruit (The Life in Christ, Books I, VI; deCatanzaro 1974). For this reason Cabasilas can address the layman in the world as fully capable of the life in Christ, since that life depends not on withdrawal or technique but on the Mysteries available to every member of the Church.

It is this sacramental mysticism that has made The Life in Christ so widely read in the modern Orthodox revival and that has commended it even beyond Orthodoxy. Cabasilas wrote during the hesychast controversy and was a partisan of St. Gregory Palamas, yet his masterwork is remarkably free of polemic, presenting the positive content of the Christian life rather than defending it against an adversary (on his relation to Palamism see The Hesychast Synthesis; on his place in modern Orthodox spirituality see Cabasilas in Orthodox Spirituality). His insistence that the goal of the human creature is union with the indwelling Christ, communicated through the Mysteries and perfected in deification, gives the treatise a coherence and a warmth that have outlasted its century. The dogmatic and historical dimensions of his teaching on grace and the sacraments are pursued further in the theology section of this collection (see Grace and the Sacraments; on the principles governing this account see the methodology).

See Also

• Union with Christ — the theology of the indwelling Christ and deification that is the inner aim of the sacramental life
• The Layman Theologian — the lay author who addressed the life in Christ to Christians in the world
• The Explanation of the Liturgy — the companion commentary on the rite by which the Mysteries are celebrated
• The Hesychast Synthesis — Cabasilas’s relation to Palamism and the controversy of his day
• A Christ-Centred Anthropology — the dignity of human nature made for Christ, the theme of the closing books
• The Sacraments of Initiation: Baptism and Chrismation — the Mysteries of Books II–III in the dogmatic frame
• The Eucharist — the Mystery of Book IV, the perfection of the life in Christ

References

• Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Books I–VII; the life begun here and perfected hereafter, Book I; Baptism as birth and being, Book II; Chrismation as energy, Book III; the Eucharist as perfection and consummation, Book IV; the consecration of the altar, Book V; the life of virtue and human nobility, Books VI–VII.)
• Cabasilas, Nicholas. La Vie en Christ. Ed. and trans. Marie-Hélène Congourdeau. Sources Chrétiennes 355 & 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990. (Critical Greek text, French translation, and commentary; the standard scholarly edition.)
• Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Cabasilas’s sacramental doctrine of deification, esp. 304–306.)
• Spiteris, Yannis. Cabasilas: teologo e mistico bizantino. Rome: Lipa, 1996. (The structure and theology of The Life in Christ and Cabasilas’s sacramental mysticism.)
• Bobrinskoy, Boris. The Mystery of the Church: A Course in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012. (The sacramental and Trinitarian theology of the Christian life in the tradition Cabasilas represents.)